Dick Francis's Damage Read online

  Part of what I’d said to Nigel had been true—I would be happy to move on from the BHA and maybe I would do just that after this particular crisis was over.

  On operations in the army I had regularly made decisions on which my life, and those of others, depended. Of course I had known that things would be very different in Civvy Street, but maybe after three years away from it I longed once more for the excitement and adrenaline rush that came with such life-or-death choices.

  But I could also remember the fear and the bowel-twisting panic that had gripped my body when things had started to go badly wrong in that Afghan house. I broke out in a cold sweat just thinking about it. Thankfully, working for the BHA had been far less eventful on that front.

  So far anyway.

  —

  LYDIA CAME HOME just after six, hurrying through the front door.

  “Jenny says you’ve been fired.”

  Amazing, I thought, how bad news travels so much faster than good.

  “Who’s Jenny?” I asked.

  “Jenny Green,” she said. “Nigel’s wife. She sent a text to warn me.”

  “I didn’t know you were still in touch.”

  “We’re not, but she must have kept my number. Is it true? Have you been fired? Why? How are we going to pay the mortgage?” She was almost in tears.

  What did I say? Was this a need-to-know situation? Probably.

  “Yes and no,” I said.

  “It must be either yes or no,” said Lydia with ill-disguised impatience. “It can’t be both.”

  “It can,” I replied. “Yes, because everyone was told, including Nigel, that I had indeed been fired. And no, because I wasn’t really. I’m still working for the BHA on a particular case but I’m doing so undercover.”

  “Is it safe?” Lydia asked with concern. When we’d first met, she’d had to deal with the mental fallout from my experiences in Afghanistan that had haunted my sleep for ages. Neither of us wanted to go back to those days.

  “Perfectly safe,” I said. “But don’t tell anyone. And especially not Jenny.”

  “You surely don’t think Nigel is involved in anything illegal.”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “What, then?”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re always so bloody secretive. Tell me what you’re doing.”

  “I’m working on a problem that is very hush-hush. So secret, in fact, that hardly anyone at BHA even knows it exists.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Need to know?

  “Darling,” I said, “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”

  I could see she didn’t like it.

  “Don’t you trust me?” she asked somewhat indignantly.

  “Of course I trust you,” I said, “but I still can’t tell you.”

  The only way to keep a secret really secret was to tell nobody.

  To my knowledge, apart from me, there were eleven others who knew about the doping and attempted extortion. They were the seven nonexecutive BHA Board members, Howard Lever, the chief executive, Stephen Kohli, director of integrity, Crispin Larson, senior intelligence analyst, plus, of course, the extortionist himself.

  In my opinion, eleven was ten too many, and I was worried that some members of the Board may not have fully appreciated the need for complete confidentiality in spite of my plea to them for absolute silence about the matter.

  I had insisted that they should tell no one, not even their wives. If each of them told only one person, that person would then tell two others, who would each tell two or three more, and so on. Within a week, the details would be common knowledge among the racing community, if not the whole country.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Lydia. “Everyone has been sworn to secrecy and that includes me.”

  “So what are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Work from home, mostly,” I said. “I still have remote access to the BHA files. But I’ll be going to Cheltenham tomorrow.”

  She opened her mouth as if she was going to ask why but then shut it again. If there was one thing she must have learned about me by now, it was that I wouldn’t say something if I didn’t want to.

  And that included the words Will you marry me?

  10

  I sat in my study until nearly midnight studying the contents of Crispin Larson’s red file, looking for a common denominator that would indicate how the doping of forty-six horses had been done, or, more accurately, I was searching for the difference that had resulted in the three that had tested negative.

  Those three, Tail End Charlie, Targetman and Barometer, were all trained in England rather than in Ireland, Wales or Scotland, but so were twenty-seven other horses that had tested positive. Each of the three had a different trainer, one in Lambourn, one in Northamptonshire and the third in the village of Prestbury, close to the racetrack. The only interesting thing they had in common was that all three had run in races on the Friday, the fourth and final day of the Festival, but nine others who had run only on that afternoon had returned positive tests.

  How could a single man dope so many horses?

  Carrying a bagful of methylphenidate-charged syringes around, ready to stab a needle into any passing horseflesh, was clearly impossible.

  Horses are not left on their own at any time except when in the racetrack stables and those were mostly covered by closed-circuit television. The CCTV footage was one of the things I was definitely going to ask to see the following day.

  So, if the methylphenidate was not injected, it must have been ingested with food. But more than half the horses arrived at the track in the morning and then went home again in the late afternoon without having eaten anything in between.

  Again I wondered about the CCTV footage. Would it show someone wandering around the racetrack stables dishing out drug-laced morsels to those waiting to perform on the track?

  —

  I CAUGHT a train from Paddington Station to Swindon at five to eight and changed there for the line to Cheltenham.

  Lydia and I had owned our own car, but we had decided two years ago that it was an unnecessary expense and more trouble than it was worth. I always used public transport to get to my office in central London, and on two occasions the car had been broken into and vandalized during the day while parked on the road outside our flat.

  The realtor company provided Lydia with a brand-painted Mini that she drove for her work. She was allowed to use it for short, private trips, but I wasn’t insured to drive it.

  Hence, I was used to going to racetracks by train and taxi. Occasionally I hired a car when I really needed one, but I was generally happy to let the train take the strain.

  I usually passed the journey catching up on my e-mails, although I was frustrated that so few of the rail companies provided a reliable Internet service on board their trains.

  It always seemed strange to me that phone companies spent so much time and money providing a good cell service on the freeways—where drivers were not allowed to use them—whilst seemingly neglecting the rail network entirely.

  I looked out the window at the rolling Gloucestershire hills that completely blocked any hope of making a call. In particular, I was keen to speak to Faye, who had just started her chemotherapy. Quentin had phoned the previous evening, but more to ask how my investigation into Kenneth’s problem was proceeding than to report on his wife’s condition.

  “Have you found the bloody friend yet?” he had said as soon as I’d answered.

  “As a matter of fact, I have. But I haven’t had a chance to speak to him.”

  “Offer him five grand to retract his statement.”

  Quentin, I’d thought, was getting desperate. His initial “few hundred quid” had abruptly risen tenfold.

  “Are you sure that’s wise?” I’d asked.
“Might it not be regarded as perverting the course of justice?”

  “Bugger that,” Quentin had said. “Just get rid of him.”

  I wondered if it was going to be quite as easy to “get rid of him” as Quentin had anticipated.

  The train made its sedate way through Kemble, Stroud and Gloucester, before arriving at Cheltenham a little after ten o’clock.

  The last time I’d been here, just eleven days ago on Gold Cup Day, sixty thousand race fans had been making their way to the racetrack on the northern edge of the town, many of them from the railway station on the specially arranged fleet of double-decker busses. Now the situation was completely different, with only a handful of passengers alighting onto the platform and a line of snoozing taxi drivers waiting outside on the road.

  Not that the racetrack itself had returned to the same sleepy existence as the town. There were contractors’ trucks all over the place, with a horde of workers taking down the temporary stands, the chalet restaurants and the tented village that two weeks ago had been swarming with eager punters.

  Was it really just two weeks since I had watched Matthew Unwin commit murder right here in front of the grandstand? It felt like much longer.

  I went to the reception to present my BHA credentials and to inform them that I would be carrying out an inspection of the stables. I asked to speak to the racetrack manager.

  “He’s away,” the woman behind the desk informed me.

  “When is he back?” I asked, cross with myself for not checking before I came all this way.

  “He only went yesterday,” she said. “He’s gone skiing in Austria.”

  “Then can I speak to the head of security?”

  “I’m afraid he’s away as well. In fact, nearly everyone’s away this week. There are only a few of us left in the office, plus the Clerk of Works, of course. He’s out and about somewhere, overseeing the removal of everything. Lots of people take time off once the Festival is over.” She sounded rather indignant that she wasn’t one of them.

  “Who has access to the CCTV from the stables? I’d like to view the footage.”

  “Hold on.” She disappeared for a moment but soon reappeared with a young man even I thought looked too young to be out of school. “I’m sure young Freddie can help you,” said the woman. “He’s our resident boffin.”

  Young Freddie led me to one of the back rooms that was almost full to the ceiling with banks of black electronic boxes.

  “We have over sixty fixed cameras,” he said with obvious pride, “as well as several temporary ones we set up just for the Festival. Everything is recorded in here on these.” He waved a hand towards the black boxes.

  “I’m particularly interested in those covering the racetrack stables,” I said.

  “Twelve cameras cover the stable area. When are you interested in?”

  “Gold Cup Day,” I said.

  He sat down at a computer console. “You’re lucky. Up until last year, we kept the recordings only for seven days. Now, with this new kit, it’s twenty-eight. Then they’re overwritten. If we need to keep anything longer, it has to be specially downloaded prior to that. Like the stuff showing the murder of that bookie on Champion Hurdle Day. The cops took a permanent record of that.”

  He typed some instructions into the computer.

  “There,” he said. “These are the camera recordings for Gold Cup Day.” Images of the stable appeared on the monitor, views from four different cameras shown at once. “What time?”

  “In the morning,” I said. “I’m not really sure when. How about eleven o’clock?”

  The images flickered as young Freddie used a tracker ball to move the recordings forward until the readout at the top of the screen showed 11.00. Then he set the footage running at ×6.

  “Saves time,” he explained. “You don’t miss anything at times six. Not like at times twelve or thirty, where it jumps.”

  I watched as horses were led in and out of the stables, their movements appearing comically unnatural at six times their normal speed. Grooms rushed in and out of frame like something from the Keystone Kops.

  “What are you looking for, exactly?” he asked.

  “Anything out of the ordinary.”

  He glanced up at me. “These images would have been playing on the day in real time in the stable security office. All the cameras’ feeds are shown at once. The staff would surely have noticed if there was anything out of the ordinary going on.”

  That depended, I thought, on how vigilant they were. But I decided not to say so.

  I could tell it was a hopeless task. With twelve separate cameras covering the stables, each of them recording nonstop for four days, I calculated that it would take me forty-eight hours’ continuous viewing to see it all, even with four images shown at once, and at ×6. I’d require an army of watchers and I didn’t have one.

  I needed to narrow down the search.

  “Do you have a record of which horse was stabled in which stall?”

  “Not here. That’ll be with Mr. Hunter. He’s the stables manager.”

  “Can we find him?” I asked. “Or is he away on holiday as well?”

  “I know he’s about somewhere,” Freddie said. “I saw him earlier in reception. His office is down at the stables, but I don’t know if he’s there. They’re not open except when we’re racing. But I can try him, if you like.”

  He lifted a phone from the desk and dialed, but there was clearly no answer.

  “Can I still get in?”

  “Sure,” Freddie said. “I’ll fetch the keys.”

  We walked down to the stables with the young boffin pointing out to me the CCTV cameras as we passed by.

  “How long have you worked here?” I asked.

  “Nearly two years now,” he said, smiling broadly. “I absolutely love it. Started straight from school. I’m also doing a B.Tech. course in electronics in college. Two days a week.”

  His enthusiasm was infectious, and I found myself greatly enjoying his company as we made our way down the hill, past the Centaur Centre, to the red-brick complex that housed not only the racetrack stables but also the grooms’ canteen and accommodation.

  Freddie unlocked the gates under the entrance archway.

  About a quarter of the horses running at the Festival were trained in Ireland and they would come over a few days early in order to recover from the journey, especially the crossing of the Irish Sea, which could be notoriously rough in March. And those from the north of England and Scotland also required overnight stops before they ran. And sometimes afterwards as well.

  Even the more local trainers were keen to get their horses to Cheltenham early on Festival mornings to avoid the long race-day traffic jams that could build up later around the track.

  There were two hundred individual stalls but, with more than one hundred and twenty regularly competing on each day of the Festival, plus the long-stay Irish, space was at a premium and trainers were encouraged to remove their horses quickly after racing.

  While some trainers liked their horses to arrive a full eight hours before the race, others were happy to have them there just two or three hours in advance. In any event, all horses had to be checked into the racetrack stables at least forty-five minutes before they were due to race so that their identity could be confirmed using the microchip embedded in their necks.

  Hence, the stables were always busy, both in the run-up and throughout the Festival, with a continuous stream of horses entering and leaving, each of them having to be checked in and out by the stable security staff. How they were expected to have time to watch the CCTV screens as well was a mystery.

  On this day, however, the place was deserted, with row upon row of closed stable doors and not even the smell of a horse evident.

  “It all feels rather sterile,” I said to Freddie.

 
“The stalls are washed out and disinfected after each horse departs, and the whole place is done again before each meeting.”

  We wandered up and down the rows of stalls, past the place set aside for the washing down of the horses after they’d raced. It was all spotlessly clean. Any evidence of methylphenidate would have surely been washed away by now.

  “That’s the Irish yard,” Freddie said, pointing through an archway into a semi-separate section. “There are fifty-two stalls in there. It’s where the Irish trainers like to have their horses at the Festival.”

  “Is there any way we could find out which horse was in a particular stall on Gold Cup Day?” I asked.

  “We could try the stable manager’s office,” Freddie said, jangling the bunch of keys.

  We found a list of sorts pinned to a notice board at the back of the office. It had originally been printed on a computer but now it had multiple crossings-out and additions made in black ink, with arrows all over the place indicating changes that had occurred. It was the sort of plan only fully decipherable by whoever had done the changes.

  However, the list did show that Barometer had been housed in stall number 62. His name had not been crossed out or written over in ink, it was still the original print, and there were no arrows to or from it.

  Barometer had been one of the three horses that hadn’t tested positive.

  “I’d like to see number 62, please.”

  I unpinned the list from the notice board and took it with me.

  Stall 62 was on the right of the central block, about two-thirds of the way down from the entrance. It didn’t appear any different to any of the others. Why would it?

  I donned some thin white latex gloves and took some swab samples from the floor, and also from the manger in the corner.

  “What are you doing?” Freddie asked.

  “Checking for equine flu,” I said. “Just to be sure.”

  “They’ve all been disinfected,” he replied in a tone that implied he thought I was a complete idiot. “You should have been here when the horses still were. It’s a bit late to be doing it now, if you ask me.”